Category: Marketing

Even as direct marketing becomes focused on email campaign strategy, a direct mail marketing campaign can still be effective. A direct mail campaign is harder to ignore than a mass email. It also provides potential customers with a tangible example of a company’s desire to sell to them. As the owner of a start-up, using a direct mailer could set you apart from your competitors. You may wonder how to set it up though. Your start-up has not done such a campaign before. A bad campaign could be expensive in postal fees. However, the following steps will show you how to start a direct mail marketing campaign.

Build A Mailing List

Before you can mail anything out, you need to decide who to mail it to. Like other marketing, your mailing will only be effective if it is carefully targeted. Do your research and produce a list of leads the same as you would for an email campaign, only taking their home addresses instead of emails. You can then buy more mailing names depending on the criteria you are looking for in customers. Together, these two methods should produce a list of people likely to buy your products. This list will ensure your investment in printing and postage is not wasted.

Create The Mailer

You now need to design the mailer you will send to the customers. This should be a custom-made piece that uses window envelopes. It should be much more noticeable than your company’s usual brochure’s or pamphlets. Your mailer should be informative, providing the reader with all the info they need on the product your advertising. It should also encourage a call to action, a statement that encourages them to call or email you back if they are interested. Additionally, use plenty of graphics, but make sure they are relevant to your message. This mailer needs to do one job, sell your product. You should avoid including anything that interferes with that goal.

Test The Campaign

Before you start the mass mailing, test the mailer to make sure the campaign works. To do this, send the mailers to one small area of your overall target and measure the response to your sales department. If you get a good rate of leads following the call to action, you can expand the rollout to other areas. This process of test and expand ensures that you don’t spend money on a failing campaign. Every expense comes after you’ve proven interest in the one before. This scale up also makes it easier for your company to respond to interest by staggering the roll-out. Testing like this is the only effective way to make sure your assumptions about the customers are true.

Process Responses and Analyze

Now that the mailers are going out, your company needs to be ready for responses. Potential customers interested by your flyer will quickly lose interest if they can’t get a hold of you. If you put a phone number on the mailer for response, make sure your company is ready for the call volume, without putting people on hold. If you told them to go to a website, make sure you can take the surge in users. You should also be ready to take the data these responses will generate. This data will be essential to determine your return of investment, or ROI. Your ROI lets you know whether the campaign worked. This step is the most important, since it is where potential customers become actual customers.

Repeat The Process

Now that your mail campaign is a success, you need to do it again. These fresh customers will forget about your company quickly if you don’t jog their memories from time to time. A good direct mail campaign will interlock with the next campaign, and the one after that. Marketing like this needs to be a constant process. You should always be thinking of new mailers to send or ways to connect the mailers to your other marketing. That way your brand is constantly reinforced in the customer’s mind.

The following steps will help you build a successful direct mail marketing campaign. Research your desired audience and create a mailing list that is likely to respond to you. Use this knowledge to create a mailer that will call people to action. Test the campaign in a small area to prove it works. As you launch, be ready to respond to interested leads, and study their data to produce an ROI. Repeat the process with interlocking campaigns so your customers don’t forget you. These steps will let you dominate the mail marketing space.

Content is the bread and butter of any online business. It helps define your personality. It establishes your brand. It attracts prospects, keeps them at your website, and turns them into customers. Content is an essential element of your online success. Mixing it up and providing new forms of content to your audience can give your business the boost you may be looking for. In fact, a simple ten page report can accomplish loads. Here are some ideas:

1. Give it away as a lead magnet

Probably the most obvious use of a ten-page report is to give it away as an opt-in for your email list. Create a top-quality and highly focused report. Require an email address for delivery, and start creating a mailing list. Of course, the benefit comes when you begin emailing these qualified prospects, connecting with them, and converting them to customers.

2. Give it away for free

If you already have an email list, consider providing them a free report with no strings attached. Use the report to further establish your likeability, credibility, and authority.

You can give your report away for free on your blog or website, but why not reach out to a new audience on Slideshare? Include a call to action at the end of your report to promote a book, services, or products depending on your business model.

3. Publish It!

You can’t publish a book for free on Kindle and 10 pages isn’t really enough to justify charging even the smallest price allowed in the Kindle store. You can certainly try it, but you may risk getting bad reviews. However, you can publish a book for free at Smashwords, which also makes your book available on other platforms including Apple iBookstore, Sony, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and Aldiko. A published book, or report, helps boost awareness for your business. It also helps build credibility.

Finally, if you’re giving the report away for free, don’t hesitate to break it into smaller pieces to use in other locations. Use a section for article marketing purposes. Share a page in your newsletter. Pull nuggets of information out of the report and share them on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

One simple ten-page report can help you achieve your business goals. It can give you the boost you’ve been looking for and best of all, you can create a short report in one afternoon. It’s a fantastic return on your investment.

Do you know the worth of the global baby product market? According to Statista, it’s worth $10.3 billion. In fact, this market is expected to continue its growth for years to come. To those of you who plan to build an online business by selling feeding bottles, bathing accessories, and baby clothing, the stats mean one thing: Now is the best time to start.

After all, who doesn’t need baby products? Mothers do, as they are the primary caregivers of babies. If you are to begin an ecommerce store, it’s important to equip yourself with the knowledge needed to effectively promote your baby products. That said, pay close attention to the demands of new mothers because they are the best persons that know how to keep their babies healthy and make them feel good.

When it comes to promoting baby products to moms, there are some things you should consider. We’ve prepared a useful guide for you.

Make it About Them

While baby products are in demand, unfortunately, you can’t market to babies. You market to mothers, which is why you ought to craft messages that win their trust and loyalty. Mothers are multidimensional beings and play many roles. One way to know the topics that appeal to mothers is to visit mom blogs and check what kind of topics they write about. You’ll see posts that revolve around “non-toxic,” “organic,” and “nanotechnology.” It would also help to check discussions on Facebook groups and discussion websites.

Know What Worked

Whether or not this is your first time to market to mothers, it pays to know what ecommerce business owners like you did to succeed. Most marketing techniques hold true to nearly all ecommerce niches, and all you have to do is tap into existing resources that give you valuable marketing advice. For example, you’d want to read quotes from expert ecommerce marketers that show you the best secrets to running an ecommerce store.

Find Influencer Moms

Mothers are known to be heavy users of social media. They want to share their experiences with their child to other moms like them. Moms spill secrets and trade baby care techniques. If you leverage the power of influencer marketing, make sure to use influencers who are mothers themselves. Recommendations from people who your mom audience can relate to are likely to translate into sales. Mommy influencers are a powerful force as they’re looked up to as trustworthy voices than brands.

Make It Quick

As much as you want to be comprehensive with your messages, you should understand that moms are the busiest. So if, for example, you write a blog post or show them a Facebook ad, get straight to the point. They should know what’s in it for them at a glance of their screens – especially if they’re in the middle of a chore. Being fast also means that you leverage a fast delivery service. There’s nothing that delights a mommy customer more than receiving her baby products in a short period of time.

Go Mobile

To effectively position your brand in front of moms, you need to optimize your website for mobile devices. Why? Millenial mothers use their smartphones to go online. Mobile devices are more convenient especially that moms are able to list grocery items, visit Facebook, take pictures of their babies, and communicate with family members at once. Check that your website displays products beautifully on different screen sizes. Fonts should be big enough for them to read.

A Final Note

There’s a huge opportunity that awaits in the baby products market. Regardless of the marketing tactics you follow to reach out to new mothers, always provide value. As the primary buyer of baby items, pay attention to their needs.

Not every product can be a jet-ski a treehouse in the forest or a superfast motorbike that quite simply sells itself due to the excitement and interest in generates. In fact, most of the products we manufacture, buy and sell are practical products that are not all that exciting.

From air filters and air tight access panels to pencil sharpeners and paint, there are lots of practical products that are absolutely vital to many of us for many different reasons, but which due to their practicality, can be more difficult to market. However, they also have an advantage in that we do need them.

So, it is possible to market practical products, but how do you do it? Here are some ideas:

Have a Sense of Humor About It

So, you know that accounting is about as boring as it gets, but you have a great accounting apps to sell – use your sense of humour. Poke fun at the abject boringness of accountancy and how dull it all is and not only will your audience will laugh right along with you, but you’ll be laughing your way to the bank too.

Make it Seem Exciting

So, you have some pimple cream to sell, and it’s the least sexy product you can possibly think of, you’re absolutely at your wits end about how to market it. I mean, showing someone with spots and then without them will show the product’s effectiveness, but there will always one those people who doubt that you’re telling the truth, right, so what do you do? Instead of doing the same old boring before and after, you shake it up. You show a young guy using your pimple cream before heading out on his motorcycle to a great party where he ends up meeting a beautiful young girl, and they ride off into the sunset together – you make it sexy and exciting – it’s basically marketing 101.

Hire a Celebrity

If you don’t have the big money, then it doesn’t matter how practical your product is, if you can find a celebrity who is willing to endorse it, they will help you to draw considerable attention to your product, and you will see an increase in sales. If you can’t afford a top-end celebrity, then asking social media influencers to promote your stuff will work in a similar way.

If your product offers a lot of safety, then you really cannot go wrong by focusing your marketing efforts on that fact because consumers love products that make them feel safe. So, you might think it’s a pretty standard product, but if it helps prevent someone being robbed or their house going up in flames, play up to that, create emotions and tell the consumer exactly how your product will save people – they’ll lap it up.

Instead of worrying about how you’re going to market your most practical products, start thinking about all of the reasons why they are so great, how you can use the above methods to make other people realize that and start acting. People need these things and they will buy them regardless, so make sure they buy from you!

Print brochures are a versatile printed material that has many different uses for businesses that know how to use them effectively. Not all marketing is online; offline marketing still has its place for smart companies.

Here are five ways that companies can use brochures to promote their business successfully.

1. Product Brochure for a Trade Expo

When you’re preparing marketing materials for an upcoming expo, you don’t want to use cheap brochure printing because it will likely be low-quality. Brochure printing complete with coated art paper and a glossy finish needn’t be pricey, but it’s certainly less expensive than magazine printing because print magazines have a greater number of pages. Even when thicker card stock and fancy finishes are used with some brochures, a magazine with full-colour photos and quality paper stock will still cost more than an attractive brochure.

Being able to hand out quality print brochures to expo attendees to take home with them reminds them of the company long after they’ve left the event. When wanting to look up large pictures of products before ordering a batch or to check on the product specifications, this type of information can be provided within the pages.

2. To Educate the Reader

Companies that have products which are difficult to explain in a catchy tweet have plenty of space in a brochure to break down the features of the product and how it might best be used. Business products tend to be more complicated than consumer-oriented ones and business-focused brochures can take advantage of the longer attention span to educate the reader.

Depending on the type of product being promoted, it may be possible to make it a fun demonstration in print using exceptional photography and interesting use of colour. When taking the reader through a step-by-step process on how to use the new product to produce something useful or exciting, then this gets the point across really well because it taps into the emotional core while educating too.

3. Limited Edition

Sometimes companies want to produce something unique that different to what they’ve done before. A custom design from a notable artist or a one-off product based on customer feedback that will never be part of the main range but will likely have niche appeal is a solid goal. Whatever the purpose, it’s not practical to insert a product that’s produced in limited quantities inside the regular product brochure. This is where a special limited-edition brochure is ideal to showcase the uniqueness, the special effort that’s gone into it, and why it has the customer’s name written all over it.

By separating out the limited-edition item, it also makes it easier to charge a premium price for this one-time opportunity. The pricing can stand completely separate to the normal pricing expectations of the standard range of products because it’s not been marketed in the same way.

4. Making It Easier for Salespeople

For companies where customers visit a showroom or their head office to place an order, a brochure can be an effective way to make it clearer what the ordering options are.

A courier could lay out different package sizes on one page and show charts with weights and destinations on another. Customers can easily flick through the pages to select their package size, scan down a destination list to find the right destination code, and then confirm their pricing.

For clothing companies where clothing stores need to understand the garment sizes and colour availability when ordering for the next season, salespeople can visit their shop and run through their choices using a brochure containing the full details on colours, sizes and product ordering options. Being able to travel with the brochure and some sample garments in the boot makes it easier to demonstrate product available and take the correct order from the customer.

5. Custom Promotional Mailing

When segmenting your customers into different demographics or groups based on past purchase history and other factors, it’s possible to target affluent or regular buyers with a custom offering that will appeal to their sensibilities. After all, everyone likes to feel special and an offer that’s mailed out to them with a professional covering letter and a small brochure describing what’s on offer is likely to be well received.

There are many ways to use professional brochures in your business. Whether it’s to celebrate limited-edition items, promote through the mail using cost-effective methods, prepare a product brochure for a trade expo or something else entirely, brochures are powerful marketing tools.

When used effectively, a printed brochure can help salespeople complete a sale with a prospect who was wavering. For people who are less comfortable using the internet to access product information or who like to order by mail, providing a brochure is an excellent way to secure their flow of steady orders that might never have happened if this option wasn’t available. Really, the possibilities are endless.

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